School Age

Some describe their school years as halcyon days, others look back less fondly. We would like to help your family to view them as the former. This age brings many challenges, but also many rewards for both parent and child, it is an age of wonder, discovery and delight.

Advice for School Starters – Smoothing the Transition

It might be their first step away from you and into a more formal educational setting, or it might be a move to a new teacher. Whatever the transition is, it is likely to be huge for your child. It will be a new environment, with new staff and possibly different peers. All of the constants that help your child feel secure might have been taken away to be replaced by unknowns.

The Importance of Playful Parenting

Playful Parenting helps with the toughest aspects of parenting: tantruming toddlers, biting preschoolers, anxious third-graders, out-of-control preteens. Playfulness resolves our battles over getting dressed and ready in the morning, soothes our frazzled nerves at the end of a long day, and restores family harmony.

Childhood Anxiety and The Fear-O-Meter

When a person is anxious, the alert and alarm functions are highly active, while the rest of the brain isn’t doing much. Assignment of a number on the Fear-O-Meter activates different pathways of the brain, and that helps turn down the alarm.

Six Steps To Work Towards Gentle Parenting

As adults we command respect from our children, and other adults, on a daily basis. We expect to be treated in a certain way, we expect others to take our thoughts, rights and beliefs into account in all dealings with us. If a child in particular shows us a lack of respect we are quick to pull them up on it (especially if they are tweens or teens!), yet do we afford our children the same priviledge?

The Problem with Rewards & Sticker Charts

When you start to dig deeper into the psychology of rewards, such as sticker charts, you very quickly begin to realise that there is a large amount of science that refutes their use, claiming they are ineffective. Not only do these types of rewards lack in convincing evidence of efficacy, they can also cause more problematic behaviour in the future.

What to do When Gentle Parenting Isn’t Working

Gentle parenting is hard, it is an investment, an investment into your child’s future as well as your own and those that will follow down the generations, but it’s not quick fix and it’s not easy. Gentle parenting also involves a long hard look at yourself and the way that you behave and indeed the way that you were parented – this introspection can be perhaps the hardest and most painful part of all, but in many ways it is the most necessary.

The Importance of Relaxation for Children

Children who have relaxation as part of their daily routine are often calmer, more in control and able to cope with life’s ups and downs. Subsequently, parents feel calmer and family life is generally happier. However, some children find stopping and becoming still without any stimulation incredibly difficult. It is best to start in very short bursts so your child enjoys the experience rather than finds it a chore.

Helping Teens Manage School Stress

Have you created an environment where your child knows they can talk to you, without judgement, about anything? Students who get behind on schoolwork or fail an exam often do not want to tell their parents because they fear the reaction. If they feel they can talk to you, they are more likely to seek your help before they get entirely off track.

Letting Your Child Go as They Grow

Children today have less independence than any other generation has in the past. Do you remember the happiest days of your own childhood? The chances are you will have many happy memories of playing outside with your friends, on your bike, in fields, woods, alleyways and parks. What memories will children of today grow up with? Television programmes, computer games and soft play centres?

Growing Pains

Research suggests that up to 49% of young children experience growing pains at some point in childhood. Nobody really knows what causes growing pains although they do tend to run in families and seem to spontaneously resolve by late childhood.